But what about Judy herself? Kamp overheard her on the phone with a friend, her big hand cupped over the receiver, relaying how she woke up to the sound of shuffling under her bed. She looked over the edge of the mattress and saw a pair of sneakers slip underneath. She heard children giggling. That’s what she said. She said that of course she assumed it was the kids, Walter himself, but when she rolled off the bed there was nothing but lint beneath.

Kamp stepped away from the window. He sat at the kitchen table and absently fingered a piece of charcoal he’d worked to a small chunk, making measurements on the walls, where to place the spotlights, where to chop down the walls.

Then he started drawing lines on his face. War paint. Thick black lines that began near the bridge of his nose and curved up and over his round cheeks. While doing so, he eyed a pineapple on the kitchen counter.

The head of it looked like feathers. Enough like them. In fact, the longer he stared at the pineapple, the more that whole fruit looked like Blackwater himself. A native who knew this land was bad news long before the pale shades found out for themselves.

“We didn’t believe you,” Kamp said, putting the finishing touches on his war paint. Protection, perhaps, against a ghost. “And most of us still don’t believe you now. But I do.”

Then he got up and, as the same admonishing rain that Blackwater himself must’ve faced without a roof, as he lay dying in the West Fields, pounded against the secure windows of Kamp’s rooms, Kamp cut the top of the pineapple off and placed it gently upon his reddish-brown mop of hair.

“This land is for nobody,” he said, facing the length of his rooms, looking through the haze of holiday lights to his transparent bed. “This land is…”

But he didn’t want to say the word. Not even dressed as he was, prepared to face the entity that was coming to steal something from him.

He didn’t want to say haunted.

Then, crying out like Blackwater might have, he threw the knife he’d used to chop the pineapple across his rooms, saw it land short of his bedroom and slide smoothly under his bed.

11

Carol’s phone rang seven times before she answered. Carol, whose name, being so close to George and Hardy Carroll’s own, delivered a young Walter Kamp a ceaseless and bitter envy.

“What is it?” she cried. “Is someone hurt?”

“Carol, it’s Walter. No one’s hurt.”

“Walter? What’s going on?”

“How did you handle it, Carol?”

He sat on the couch, the pineapple top balancing on his head.

“Handle what, Walter?”

“How did you handle it when you saw your ghost?”

“What ghost?”

Kamp nervously played with the phone cord.